Glad to find this forum. I had no idea others were having similar issues with EL. Our story is similar. We started with Earthlink when all they offered was dialup service. I think it was back in 1996 or so. We upgraded to DSL when it became available in our area. I have to say it was rare to have issues with our service until about 2 years ago. Our workhorse Speedstream modem died after 8 years and when we called tech support they said they would send us a new upgraded modem for free since the speedstreams were outdated anyway. I think it was a Uptopia or something similar to that. Shortly after that we started having issues with dropped connections. That modem lasted for several years and then they replaced it with a Zyxel for $20. We still had issues. Most of the time resetting the modem would work but sometimes it would take several hours to come back to life. I called in several times about it but after a while I just quit calling since it always eventually would reconnect. Several times when I called I was told that they would have to lower the connection speed to solve the issue. They did that and it didn't help. We have continued having issues with disconnects and slow speed. This time we have been out of service for 2 days. The first tech I talked to was not the politest person and wanted to send us a new modem for free IF we would sign a 12 month contract, otherwise it would be $80. I explained that I didn't want to sign any contracts, we have never had a contract with them in 13 years so why now? Anyway, I told him I would think about it. I called back the next day and got another tech. He said the issue is with the phone lines and not the modem. So he contacted AT&T and they are supposedly sending someone out to check the lines. Even if they get the disconnect problems fixed I am not happy with the speed and may switch providers. That is a real pain since my husband uses his earthlink email address as his business email and you can't take that with you to another provider. And yes, most of the techs are very hard to understand and I am no slouch at understanding accents. I worked at a major university for years and had interactions with foreign students every day. Anyway thanks for reading my rant.

So when I called to cancel the account, and after a bombardment of offerings I didn't want to hear or do- she said that it was canceled and then I asked clearly- "when will the dsl line be closed" She was like (in her heavy accent) "7 to 10 days Sir" 7-10 DAYS?!! O___O and I already switched over to Verizon. She provided no answer nothing and then the call ended.

finally after a few days when I got another chance to call, I called them back and got another foreigner but a man this time (at that time I was convinced that Earthlink replaced all of their employees with cheap a$$ sweatshop workers from India.) and he asked me why was I canceling my account. I was like....... because of personal reasons. He shutup. Then I asked why is it taking 7-10 days why can't it be canceled NOW because now I got two dsl lines into 1 phone line and cannot connect. Well he couldn't give me a reason and then he said that my account is SCHEDULED to expire on the 19th of oct AND it would take 3-5 days to close.. I was like, "why can't you just do 3-5 days NOW?!!" he said "Oh? you want to completely close the account." I was like "YES I WANT TO CLOSE THE ENTIRE ACCOUNT LIKE I ASKED IN THE BEGINNING DAYS AGO!!!!!"

Gawd and you want to know what he did? he transferred me to ANOTHER sales rep. LOL I guess he didn't want to deal with me and this new sales rep was yep... a foreigner speaking woman. Dunno if its the same woman.. I lost track at this point.

After another long story short- she finally "closed my account" and now I have to wait 3-5 days making this horrible experience a whopping 2 weeks without any internet all because their stupid ass new dsl modem which they didn't even tell anybody about (btw my neighbor who has EL also had the EXACT Same issue with the new modem crap and he's a computer geek) came in and didn't like my linksys.

Again, do yourself a favor and AVOID EL! They definitely went down the toilet and they can suck monkey balls.

Hi my story begins a few months ago. As I can tell from reading other ppl's experiences with this lame company- that EL decided to ship old customers new modems. Now I have been with EL for 7 years- and used 1 dsl modem from them. Occasionally there would be a problem- but all I had to do was refresh the dsl modem and the router. Very rarely would there be an issue which warranted a call to customer service and if I ever did had to talk to them- they appeared to be nice and English speakers.

The first sign that something was admist was sometime in July- I woke up and turned on the computer and to surf the net- then all of a sudden I noticed there was no connection going through. So- like I have countless times before, I refreshed the router and dsl modem. Still nothing... ok.. so I powered down the computer... turned off the router and dsl.... still nothing worked. I went through this routine even kept everything off for several hours and still nothing worked. Finally, I called them

After 30 minutes of being put on hold, I finally get a human being... and to my astonishment it wasn't what you would call an "English" speaker. She sounded foreign and I imagined talking to somebody in India being payed 3 bucks an hour.

This dolt was hard to understand.. let alone "nice." She was a complete pain in the butt- and had a cocky attitude with me acting as if I was ignorant and I CAUSED the issues! I felt I was at war with a ***** that didn't know how to speak English let alone know that you need to be nice to your customers... throughout this painful phone call, the lady would constantly tell me to hold on as she punched on her keyboard as I was hearing ppl in the background laughing. I imagine a small banged up room in the middle of a hot India day in the desert with a half-broken ceiling fan rotating out of control with paint off of the walls falling a part... yeah it was a bad image ._.

Well the mechanical woman from India finally came back on the phone and after a senseless routine of checking the wires and whatnot she finally asked me something I just barely catched, "when you got your new dsl modem, sir, did you install the cable into the back."

I was like "HUH wait... NEW dsl modem?"

Yep apparently there was a new dsl modem otw and I was suppose to have known ALL about this crap. There was no notice in the mail, no notice in their pointless email service... nothing. So all of the troubles I was having was over a new modem that they decided to send to their customers without tell them about it! So that ended the call.

The next day I got my brand spanking new dsl modem. There was no setup CD... all that there was was the unit and a power cord.

I set the thing up and noticed how small it was to the old one (which worked fine). The next week later, I noticed I couldn't connect to my wireless router... same issues as well trying to get online. Long story short- I called again and ironically got the same person (or they hire the same type of ppl and train them in the exact same way). This time around, the person was even more mechanical and again, sounded like a foreigner. I couldn't believe it. Well after another routine check of cables she runs a test through the line and says that it couldn't connect (dUR!) but then as we kept powering down stuff and reconnecting it- she says that she couldn't help me with the router... (um why???? you guys were able to do this years ago!) well I didn't want to pull out my computer and go through the issues with the wires- so I tried to open a web browser- and sure enough, magically- it was working with my router. Oh before the call ended, the woman goes into a discussion about what offers I am eligable for... I am like... I don't need or want any offers but she ignored what I said and progressed into talking about software that I didn't want or need... I even had to stop her abruptly in the middle of her sentence and say "I am not interested" She acted as if how dare I do that to her.... Eventually she finally stopped and I just ended the call. The next few days later, I get a darn Norton antivirus software in the mail by them with 30days free but 8.95 per month afterwards >.<

Then 3 days later... the issues happened again. I didn't bother to call... but after 3 grueling hours I gaveup with the dsl modem and decided to investigate online and found out that the Zyzel modem they shipped was a two-in-one (modem and router) and many other ppl had same issues as I did with these losers. So what did this mean? I couldn't use a linksys router anymore!!! So I decided enough is enough and called to cancel their service.

Again, after 30 mins of wait- I get another foreigner sounding woman... and yep you guessed she was mechanical and rude as well. I told them from the moment on that I wanted to completely close the account- I was done with them. The first thing she wanted to know was why I was leaving.... (as if I had to answer) and I said I am going to a new service... then she punches the keyboard.. and then asks again.. I gave the same answer >.>; After the discussion she then goes I am eligible for a $10 off of something and I am like, I DON'T want anything to do with EL! She practically ignored me and then said that for 2.95 a month I can keep my email.. (I own my own website and have yahoo and hotmail why the hell do I need their email account for?). only 100 words left lol - it was a painful experience & there is another story left ; ; I don't recommend EL!!!

I have had EL for a year and 4 months now.. ..... the first year things were great..... then all of a sudden the signal started going down hill. to the point now where every night after 9pm CST i start losing connection and by 9:30pm i cant even get a connection at all .... Ive called them a couple of times and have done the live chat a few times. Its been sent up to the engineers, and now supposedly a technician is supposed to be coming to my house. I am seriously doubting I will ever see said tech... I am seriously considering switching to AT&T DSL if i dont hear from the tech in the next 2 days cause I am pushed way past my limit on patience.

I have done every single trouble shooting step that is possible on my end. I even rewired the phone lines but the problem still exists. If the problem gets so much worse after a certain time that should tell the idiots that it has to do with the amount of traffic on the server at that time..... But they dont understand English too well and I darn sure cant understand a word they are friggin saying. I am about to tell them where they can stick their service LOL

My story is similar. I have been with Earthlink for 10 years and referred many people. Out of the blue one day I received a dsl modem with no instructions, no info, just a packing slip with my password on it. I had to call; the modem would not connect. After hours of hard to understand people telling me to change all my settings, the modem still did not work. It took 3 days before they would consent to send me a replacement. They denied the possibility of the modem not functioning. I was out of service for a week. When I finally received the replacement modem, another one came the next day. I had to call again and set up the modem, and it was not configured correctly. I had to telnet in. Then I had to call again to get a return label for the modem; I told them I needed two. But no, they can only send one, and when they receive the first modem then I can call and request a second label. It has been 3 weeks; they deny receiving the modem, refuse to send a second return label and have been completely unprofessional (snotty) in the chat. The last part is really stupid as we have it all in writing.

So I switched to Verizon, I am waiting until Monday when their service starts so I can cancel Earthlink. The final straw? Three days ago they just charged my credit card for two new modems. So I called B of A and disputed the charge.

Last night, I called and cancelled the web hosting I had with them. As you said, then I got a rep that could speak clearly and wanted to know why I was canceling.

It is sort of fascinating to watch a huge company commit suicide, perhaps I'll feel more philosophical about it when I stop being so angry. How many hours have I spent on this? I lost count a long time ago.

My wife had been with EL since 1995 and she was bound and determined to hold on to her mindpsring e-mail address when I forced her to transition from intolerable dial-up to DSL. Once the transition was made things hummed along fine for a couple of years with not a single issue. Over the last 8 or 9 months the ACT light on my DSL modem would go out and I would have to unplug the LAN connection and power the modem down and all would come back fine in a few minutes. It was a minor annoyance at worst. Five days ago thing took a dramatic turn for the worse. Late in the evening we found that we were not able to access the internet, so I ran upstairs to reset the modem and found the DSL light on the modem had gone dark. I figured this was an outage and I would just call support to verify as they use to have recordings when certain areas were affected. I should have know this was the turning point to the road to insanity when a technician named Greg Smith answered and sounded like Apu from the Simpson. It was so obvious he was reading from a script and it was painful. I figured I would play along and we got to a point where he asked me to take the filter off the DSL modem and plug it directly into the wall. Not thinking, I did this and quickly realized I had just disconnected the base of the phone and had disconnected myself. Shame on me for being brain dead, so here we go with round 2 with Fred Johnson from Calcutta. It's like ground hog day over and over. Is the modem near anything electrical? Do you have another phone jack? Can you go outside and check your NID? It's was so frustrating, but I decided I would play along as coming from an IT background I know that sometimes it's the simple stuff. Within 20 minutes I was sitting in a dark room with a 4 foot phone cable hooked to the modem and a 4 foot CAT 5 cable hooked to my Mac Book and geez.... It still was not working. I'm surprised he did not make me step out of the room with the phone and yell in to eliminate the phone as a variable. Finally he said he would call the "VENDOR" which I assume is AT&T. Three hours later he called me back and said there was an outage and it would be 24 hours. Well 36 hours went by and nothing but an angry wife. Called again and they said multiple times the would send a technician out. Never happened. I finally figured I wold try the chat support and boy that was even more fun with the cut and paste awkward greetings and useless answers. Next call was almost at mid-night to tell us a technician was coming. This kept my wife pacing until 1 AM putting the dog in a state of terror. Finally work forced me to travel and my wife took over. She tried every number and phone option and could not get around the Bombay blockade. Arriving home from my trip, I found my wife in a crumple mass on the couch explaining that we now have AT&T DSL at twice the speed for the same price, but I have to wait a week and work off my air card for work. Oh Joy, downloading a GB of data at 50k! I hope and pray that AT&T works out because my only other option is Comcast and I know I would just end up on the comcastsucks.com forum after a few weeks with those turkey. It is sad when companies want to collect money from you and not provide any value at all. I'm sure that the future looks about as bright as the future of the Dodo bird for good ole EL.

SIGH! I am on this website after almost blowing a fuse on the phone with earthlink! I actually did a search on "earthlink's service sucks" and found this site. My daughter thought it was hilarious! I would have thought that too if I wasn't so aggravated. I thought it was Verizon, because the DSL line is theirs, and they also suck, but it could be a combination of two sucky companies giving me a headache. I am using dial up tonite after years on DSL because, guess what? yes, it is not working. I am not sure when this problem might have started, because I noticed it Sunday. Earthlink blames Verizon and Verizon blames Earthlink. I want to cancel the service and claim breach of contract or something, but they really get you with the automated payments crap. If you switch to getting invoices instead, they charge you 2 bucks for a monthly bill plus some other fees that I can't remember. How is this legal? I switched in Sept from Verizon because I had fond memories of Earthlink with my first Mac, but boy! this company has gone to the pits! This is not the Earthlink I dealt with over 10 years ago. How can they advertise award winning service? when was this award, 20 years ago? Someone help me out of this crappy mutated company!